Assessment

You need items, you need them now, and you need them to be clean. You need clear, concise stems and distractors that are plausible but not keyable. You need creative but accessible and psychometrically sound technology-enhanced items, performance assessments, and constructed response questions. You need an item writer who grasps the big picture, who can write a real DoK-3 item, who can align it tightly to the standards. Someone who deeply analyzes the passage and tests the truly salient points. Someone who pays attention to the details, who notices whether guidelines allow qualifiers or negative or open stems.

With thirteen years' experience in the industry, I am that writer and more. I have developed summative, formative, and interim assessments, shepherding sets from initial passage writing and selection through item acquisition and internal review to content and fairness committees and field-test and operational rangefinding. I've trained internal and external item writers and trainers and led committee meetings.

Curriculum

Having taught students from grades 4 through adult (and a lot in between!), I know pedagogy; I get what works in the classroom and what doesn't. Curriculum has to be engaging for students, research based, tightly standards aligned, flexible, user friendly, and most of all useful for busy teachers. My curriculum clients include BLPS Content Connections, Catapult Learning, the Smithsonian Institution, and DISCO Learning.